Given the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, the Internet has become a common vehicle for purveyors of goods and services to reach new customers and generate new business. In particular, online advertising is a highly-popular, Internet-based tool used by businesses to achieve their objectives, such as to increase market share.
Online advertising typically includes posting advertisements (ads) on web sites. The ads may include a marketing message, and a user may be able to click on the ad, which typically takes the user to another web page for a product or service being marketed in the ad. Ads may be provided in many forms, such as text ads, image ads, banner ads, etc. A banner ad is an ad embedded in a web page and often includes text, images, video, sound or any combination of those elements.
Ads are usually purchased from an ad service or an ad network, referred to as ad vendors herein, in order to have the ad placed on a particular web site. For example, search engines typically offer ad services whereby an advertiser pays to have their ads posted on the search engine web site or other affiliated web sites. Different purchase plans are available. One common plan includes a pay-per-click model, which charges the advertiser every time a user clicks on the ad. Many web sites, in addition to search engines, offer online advertising. Some web sites require advertisers to bid for online advertising on their sites. For example, a highest bidder may be given a premium location on the web site for their ad, or may be given the option of restricting competitors from advertising on the web page.
Many businesses allocate a large portion of their marketing budget to online advertising. However, it can be difficult for a business to quantify the impact of their online advertising campaign. In a pay-per-click model, advertisers can determine how many users are clicking on their ads. Also, if the ad directs the user to a web page where products can be purchased, a business may be able to track whether a user that clicked on an ad also made a purchase. However, this type of analysis does not provide any indication of how an online advertising campaign can be improved. In addition, rudimentary analysis of determining whether a user clicked on ad does not provide a business with feedback on how to improve their online ad campaign over a competitor's online ad campaign. Furthermore, many businesses engage in sophisticated online advertising campaigns where they are competing against competitors for ad space and they are placing many ads across many web sites. It is difficult to track the web sites to determine whether the web sites are posting their ads, and whether the ads include the proper content and are provided in the proper web page and in the proper location on the web page.